I suspect I'm not alone in this. You know who you are....my friends. The crafters. The hobbyists. The handmade artisans. Whatever you want to call yourself. You can often be found with yarn/fabric scraps/glitter/hotglue/paint or any other medium stuck to various body parts. The people at Michael's, Hobby Lobby, Hancocks, Joanns, AC Moore all know your name. You chat about life. You go to their children's bar mitvahs.
You are a craft addict. You love it. You can not STOP it. You have told your family to go eat cereal for dinner so you can finish the scarf. You have occasionally lost track of the baby only to find her under a table on the fabric piles. Your children refer to the UPS truck as the fabric truck. You bribe your children with the promise of toys if they'll just be good while you look for yarn. (These are purely imaginative ideas, not reflections of my own home. Ahem. Right.)
You invest in your projects. You love them. Sometimes you mourn them being sold or given away. You are willing to buy cheaper food and give up wine if it means you can buy designer fabric. Okay, maybe not wine, but brand name products, hair cuts or sodas are all up for budget cuts if it means more supplies.
We love our supplies, our projects, our crafty friends, the websites that allow us to pretend we are being productive (Pinterest I'm talking to you.).
But sometimes....sometimes...there are projects you just fall out of love with. Sometimes there are reasons why, sometimes there aren't.
My current 'faded' project is a Mario Bros. Granny Square blanket. It's awesome, obviously because A) it's yarn and B) its Mario. However, it keeps getting bumped down the to-do list. Why?
1.) My child is no longer obsessed with Mario. He's on a Star Wars kick. As this makes his father incredibly happy, we're cultivating it.
2.) I'm easily distractable and need to have 4-5 projects at once. I just keep finding ones I want to do more.
3.) I don't like the yarn I'm using. This is probably the most pressing issue. Because it's a blanket for my child, I was using Red Heart yarn, the herpes of yarns. (Sorry if you love Red Heart..other than Red Heart Soft I find it all to be too hard, sticky, and not smooth to work with.) I started it before I learned more about yarn. My general "budget" yarn of choice is "I Love This Yarn" from Hobby Lobby. It's soft, workable, doesn't split and is reasonably priced for those 'going to beat the hell out of it' projects.
So now that I've already done over 100 4 inch red granny squares and over 50 4 inch brown granny squares for Mario out of Red Heart yarn, I'm invested. I can't suddenly switch to ILTY, because then the blanket will feel weird. I've got to finish it out in RH yarn. But because I don't like the feel of the yarn in my fingers....I keep putting it off.
I suspect I'm not alone, as I said. I bet many of you start projects with grandiose visions and for whatever reason, cannot finish it. Or don't want to finish it. This makes me feel better, that I'm not alone.
I will probably finish Mario one day. My best friend's sons love Mario. My dilemma then is, two boys..one blanket..they're going to want another one....shudder.
So what do you have half done, frogged, put aside that you cannot seem to complete? And why??
You're not alone...it's okay...we're all craft addicts here, we can talk about it... share.
~~Amy
